A Trinity of Christian Carnivals

I've been terribly remiss in my Christian Carnivaling of late. There are three in the hopper this time.

CC 133 was at From the Anchor Hold. It contained a thoughtful discourse on the absurdity of the law of proportionality in war that I happen to agree with, from the excellent Prof. Bainbridge:

In a post carrying the same headline as mine, Ed Morrissey apparently rejects the notion that proportionality is relevant to evaluating a war:

To use a crude analogy, if someone is stupid enought to bring a knife to a gunfight, it doesn't mean that those holding the guns have a moral obligation to fight with knives instead. Proportionality demands exactly that, and it leads to nothing but longer and more destructive wars.

It's not just Morrissey, of course. We've seen the same sort of thing from a lot of folks both in the blogosphere and the punditry.

The answer is not what you expect, but I agree with him. I couldn't do what I do and remain a Christian if I didn't.

CC 134 was at Rev Ed's Attention Span. Codex asks, "was Moses high when he talked to God?"

On the subject of cannabis, like the history of the Zoroastrian religion, the Bible may have been influenced by cannabis. . . . remember Moses and the burning bush that talked to him. According to a number of academic sources in the original Hebrew and Aramaic sources for the texts, that bush commanded Moses to make a holy anointing oil that contained cannabis, under the Hebrew name keneh bosem.

Check out the answer. (It's what you expect, but I'm trying to be all Biblical Archeology Review here...)

Finally, this week's CC is up at Dory's tried-and-true Wittenburg Gate. Here, Parableman asks, "was Mohammed in the Bible?"

A friend of mine works as the Baptist Campus Minister at my university. He occasionally takes part in interfaith dialogues, and he tells me about his interactions from time to time. One such instance struck me as being apologetically significant and worth blogging about (with his permission). The conversation started out with what the Qur'an says about Jesus, and it ended up moving to what the Bible says about Muhammad. You might be wondering what the Bible could possibly say about Muhammad, since he was around long afterward, but you can't rule something like that out if you're open to predictive prophecy. Why couldn't a divine revelation have something to say about someone who hasn't come around yet? Christians believe the Hebrews scriptures point to Jesus, after all. It doesn't do to insist on that when you like it and then rule it out when you don't like it.

The answer is interesting...

More next week.

Update, 17 Aug 06:The Parableman, Jeremy Pierce, comments:

Thanks for the link.

By the way, the preferred spelling is 'Muhammad' (with a little dot under the 'h' if possible, but I don't know how to do that). Since I didn't myself spell it that way, I noticed immediately that you put that spelling in quotation marks, which suggests that I spelled it that way. Since Muslims prefer that spelling, I try to go out of my way not to offend by using other spellings.

Thanks - didn't know that, but will observe the convention in the interest of civility. Of course, it takes very little to offend muslims...

Monk